What is the guarantee that the guarantee will help
Modern organizations with their information structure rely entirely on server equipment. The uninterrupted operation of the company depends on its reliability. The realities are such that even the most reliable equipment from time to time suffers from interruptions in operation: fans, hard drives, power supplies, etc. often turn out to be weak links in the system. Since downtime is no longer calculated in hours and minutes, but often in tens and hundreds of thousands of rubles lost, it’s time to think about taking warranty measures. And the measures can be very diverse. Since our company is more focused on Hewlett-Packard equipment, we decided to analyze the options and their prices for the HP Care Pack warranty package.
The fact is that when buying equipment it can be difficult to get comprehensive advice on this product, and most importantly - to find out how much it all costs. In the end, there are a lot of options and you need to analyze all their components, starting from the specifics of your organization and, of course, the price.
The price of the various HP Care Pack extensions is determined by the equipment you purchase and its cost. And even in percentage terms, information about the cost of types of guarantees is not given. There is only one way out: to be guided by practice.
We decided to analyze the purchase price of the HP server solution combined with the paid HP Care Pack warranty package. Billing requests were sent to several large companies selling Hewlett-Packard products. In the bill, we decided to include a server with a sufficient number of hard drives. HP ProLiant DL360 G9 servers were ordered with a relatively modest configuration: 2x1.6 GHz E-2603 6-Core processors, 64 GB of RAM, 8 300GB 2.5 '' SAS 10k disks, 2 500W power supplies.
The minimum cost of all this magnificence came out rounded at 725,000 rubles, and this is only the cost of equipment. We will consider the cost of warranty services below. We can say in advance that the warranty conditions for the companies we contacted are approximately the same, depending on the margin. However, for data integrity, we will use the information provided by a Hewlett-Packard representative.
First of all, you need to figure out what this Care Pack is all about and what levels of service are provided by HP. To do this, I’d like to give an example from the page of the HP Care Pack FAQ.
First, we will analyze the general provisions.
You can choose a guarantee with self-delivery of equipment to a service center or repair with a visit to the customer. In fact, all the companies that sell HP products with which we talked offer only a guarantee type with a trip to the place of failure. Moreover, the standard guarantee included in the price of the equipment is issued for 3 years with a specialist visiting you on the next working day after contacting, which in theory is an undeniable plus. But! I would like to immediately make a couple of reservations on this subject:
- any outbound services with specified conditions are distributed within a radius of 80 km from the nearest service center (if you are further away, conditions are negotiated separately);
- in fact, based solely on our experience, help does not come on the next weekday, and numerous clarifications begin, forcing the system administrator to almost sort out the problem himself. But after about a week, the equipment was nevertheless taken for repair (perhaps such an incident occurred only with us, but special cases are usually not isolated). Perhaps it is precisely to fulfill the conditions that there is an identical, but already paid tariff (more on that below). As a result, this type of guarantee for many may not be enough.
Another item that is provided for each of the extensions is the removal or non-removal of defective media. In other words, if you have confidential information on a broken HDD that you don’t want to trust anyone even in a damaged form, then with a small surcharge to the warranty tariff, these media will not be removed after replacing with serviceable ones, but remain with you. And you can do with them as you please. Further we will assume that defective media are seized so as not to inflate the price of the issue.
Now, the most popular of the HP Care Pack extensions are covered in points.
1. Service with a guaranteed response time to the malfunction.
This extension offers service support time intervals: 9x5 (9: 00-18: 00 on weekdays), 13x5 (9: 00-22: 00 on weekdays), 24x7 (round the clock). In addition, a parameter such as “reaction time” is introduced in two versions: NBD (next business day) and 4 hours. NBD is attached to the tariff 9x5, and a 4-hour reaction for tariffs 13x5 and 24x7. For example, choose the tariff 13x4x4. You came to work and found that the server failed. Call HP support and after 4 hours, the specialist is already with you.
Now to practice.
Prices for our server.
We can conclude that the prices in this case are very loyal. However, it is worth considering that the lower the price of the equipment, the greater the percentage of the cost of this or that warranty option. As you can see, a day's downtime of equipment will cost much less than a 4-hour reaction to failure. But! Overpayments for urgency may well be discounted depending on the type of breakdown. It is said that after 4 hours the master will begin the repair, but it is not known when the damage will be fixed. However, clearer lines are offered by the next Care Pack extension.
2. Service with a guaranteed recovery time.
The extension provides guarantees for the completion of equipment repair at a fixed time: 9x5 with guaranteed NBD troubleshooting and 24x7 with a 6-hour warranty for troubleshooting. However, the 9x5 (NBD) format is available to those who are no further than 160 km from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Kazan, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok; 24x7 (6 hours) no further than 80 km from the same cities. For other settlements, the guaranteed time for fixing the malfunction is calculated at most 5 working days. So if you are no further than 80 km from the above cities and are the happy owner of the 24x7 tariff (6 hours), then already in 6 hours after treatment your equipment will be in operation.
Prices.
If your equipment is located a little further from the cities listed above, such a guarantee has doubtful advantages. Although, the most modest 9x5 (NBD) format guarantee will provide you with equipment commissioning within 5 days, which the previous expansion does not guarantee.
3. Comprehensive HP Proactive Care Services.
This extension is already at a qualitatively higher level. Well, imagine how everything happens in reality. Anew. Employees came to work, and their remote access does not work. They contact the system administrator. He, in turn, begins to look for a problem. And only having discovered the cause of the failure or not having discovered it at all, he calls the support service. And only from that moment did the time go.
All these delays result in extra hours of inactivity, and the hours result in precious piastres. What does Proactive Care offer? This extension includes the previous two with one significant difference. Here the problem is tracked automatically through iLO. The time to go to the HP center is the same as the breakdown time. All tariffs have a 24x7 support format and differ in response time to a malfunction or the time of a guarantee for troubleshooting.
But how much does it all cost?
As you can see, such support flies a pretty penny. Of course, for some companies procrastination can be very fraught, but with what to buy a 5-year warranty, is it not easier and cheaper to purchase a full-fledged spare parts kit? This information is entirely up to buyers.
4. Comprehensive HP Support Plus service.
This extension is similar to a service with a guaranteed fault response time, including a software warranty. It supports 13x5 and 24x7 formats with the start of equipment repair in 4 hours and software support in 2 hours. Basically, such a guarantee is recommended by firms when purchasing storage systems. In percentage terms, prices do not differ much with similar conditions without software support. But given the vast range of configurations of disk shelves, the percentage may vary.
HP recommends purchasing the listed warranty support options with your equipment. One thing is clear: if you have one company server, it makes sense to insure yourself against a malfunction. In practice, serious damage is rare. Mostly HDDs, power supplies fly, and very rarely memory sticks, so repairs in most cases will be limited to replacing a failed part. Therefore, it may well be limited to the first option of a 3-year warranty support in 13x4x4 format. In this case, the total cost will be 761.250 rubles.
However, for small businesses there is a great option for less money to get a stronger guarantee of the smooth operation of the equipment. Output: server hardware refurbished. After all, by purchasing 2 HP Proliant DL360 G7 servers in a similar configuration, you already have the opportunity to create a fail-safe cluster in which the virtualization program will rely on a disk system.
Consider the following kit:
1. 2 HP Proliant DL360 G7 2x2.93 GHz Xeon Six-Core x5670 / 64Gb (8x8) PC3-10600R / no HDD SAS 2.5 "Hot Swap / 2xPower 2x1200W servers - 139.800 rub. X 2 = 279.600 rub. ;
2. 2 sets for connecting 4 HDDs - 11.900 rubles x 2 = 23.800 rubles;
3. 16 new 2.5 '' HDD SAS 300 GB 10k- 13.950 rub. x 16 = 223.200 rub.
Total: 526.600 rubles.
Not only that, if one server fails, the workflow does not stop, but also, focusing on the price of the new server we reviewed, you can purchase a spare parts cluster described above, consisting of a HDD , an 8 GB memory bar and a 1200W power supply . Such spare parts will cost 29.250 rubles.
In total, such a decision will cost 555.850 rubles. As a result, a similar (for tasks) server solution is found, with a guarantee in the form of fault tolerance and spare parts for less money.
But, as has been repeatedly stated, the choice of a server solution and guarantees for it remains with the buyer, and we are ready to help with this.
The fact is that when buying equipment it can be difficult to get comprehensive advice on this product, and most importantly - to find out how much it all costs. In the end, there are a lot of options and you need to analyze all their components, starting from the specifics of your organization and, of course, the price.
The price of the various HP Care Pack extensions is determined by the equipment you purchase and its cost. And even in percentage terms, information about the cost of types of guarantees is not given. There is only one way out: to be guided by practice.
We decided to analyze the purchase price of the HP server solution combined with the paid HP Care Pack warranty package. Billing requests were sent to several large companies selling Hewlett-Packard products. In the bill, we decided to include a server with a sufficient number of hard drives. HP ProLiant DL360 G9 servers were ordered with a relatively modest configuration: 2x1.6 GHz E-2603 6-Core processors, 64 GB of RAM, 8 300GB 2.5 '' SAS 10k disks, 2 500W power supplies.
The minimum cost of all this magnificence came out rounded at 725,000 rubles, and this is only the cost of equipment. We will consider the cost of warranty services below. We can say in advance that the warranty conditions for the companies we contacted are approximately the same, depending on the margin. However, for data integrity, we will use the information provided by a Hewlett-Packard representative.
First of all, you need to figure out what this Care Pack is all about and what levels of service are provided by HP. To do this, I’d like to give an example from the page of the HP Care Pack FAQ.
First, we will analyze the general provisions.
You can choose a guarantee with self-delivery of equipment to a service center or repair with a visit to the customer. In fact, all the companies that sell HP products with which we talked offer only a guarantee type with a trip to the place of failure. Moreover, the standard guarantee included in the price of the equipment is issued for 3 years with a specialist visiting you on the next working day after contacting, which in theory is an undeniable plus. But! I would like to immediately make a couple of reservations on this subject:
- any outbound services with specified conditions are distributed within a radius of 80 km from the nearest service center (if you are further away, conditions are negotiated separately);
- in fact, based solely on our experience, help does not come on the next weekday, and numerous clarifications begin, forcing the system administrator to almost sort out the problem himself. But after about a week, the equipment was nevertheless taken for repair (perhaps such an incident occurred only with us, but special cases are usually not isolated). Perhaps it is precisely to fulfill the conditions that there is an identical, but already paid tariff (more on that below). As a result, this type of guarantee for many may not be enough.
Another item that is provided for each of the extensions is the removal or non-removal of defective media. In other words, if you have confidential information on a broken HDD that you don’t want to trust anyone even in a damaged form, then with a small surcharge to the warranty tariff, these media will not be removed after replacing with serviceable ones, but remain with you. And you can do with them as you please. Further we will assume that defective media are seized so as not to inflate the price of the issue.
Now, the most popular of the HP Care Pack extensions are covered in points.
1. Service with a guaranteed response time to the malfunction.
This extension offers service support time intervals: 9x5 (9: 00-18: 00 on weekdays), 13x5 (9: 00-22: 00 on weekdays), 24x7 (round the clock). In addition, a parameter such as “reaction time” is introduced in two versions: NBD (next business day) and 4 hours. NBD is attached to the tariff 9x5, and a 4-hour reaction for tariffs 13x5 and 24x7. For example, choose the tariff 13x4x4. You came to work and found that the server failed. Call HP support and after 4 hours, the specialist is already with you.
Now to practice.
Prices for our server.
We can conclude that the prices in this case are very loyal. However, it is worth considering that the lower the price of the equipment, the greater the percentage of the cost of this or that warranty option. As you can see, a day's downtime of equipment will cost much less than a 4-hour reaction to failure. But! Overpayments for urgency may well be discounted depending on the type of breakdown. It is said that after 4 hours the master will begin the repair, but it is not known when the damage will be fixed. However, clearer lines are offered by the next Care Pack extension.
2. Service with a guaranteed recovery time.
The extension provides guarantees for the completion of equipment repair at a fixed time: 9x5 with guaranteed NBD troubleshooting and 24x7 with a 6-hour warranty for troubleshooting. However, the 9x5 (NBD) format is available to those who are no further than 160 km from Moscow, St. Petersburg, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Kazan, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok; 24x7 (6 hours) no further than 80 km from the same cities. For other settlements, the guaranteed time for fixing the malfunction is calculated at most 5 working days. So if you are no further than 80 km from the above cities and are the happy owner of the 24x7 tariff (6 hours), then already in 6 hours after treatment your equipment will be in operation.
Prices.
If your equipment is located a little further from the cities listed above, such a guarantee has doubtful advantages. Although, the most modest 9x5 (NBD) format guarantee will provide you with equipment commissioning within 5 days, which the previous expansion does not guarantee.
3. Comprehensive HP Proactive Care Services.
This extension is already at a qualitatively higher level. Well, imagine how everything happens in reality. Anew. Employees came to work, and their remote access does not work. They contact the system administrator. He, in turn, begins to look for a problem. And only having discovered the cause of the failure or not having discovered it at all, he calls the support service. And only from that moment did the time go.
All these delays result in extra hours of inactivity, and the hours result in precious piastres. What does Proactive Care offer? This extension includes the previous two with one significant difference. Here the problem is tracked automatically through iLO. The time to go to the HP center is the same as the breakdown time. All tariffs have a 24x7 support format and differ in response time to a malfunction or the time of a guarantee for troubleshooting.
But how much does it all cost?
As you can see, such support flies a pretty penny. Of course, for some companies procrastination can be very fraught, but with what to buy a 5-year warranty, is it not easier and cheaper to purchase a full-fledged spare parts kit? This information is entirely up to buyers.
4. Comprehensive HP Support Plus service.
This extension is similar to a service with a guaranteed fault response time, including a software warranty. It supports 13x5 and 24x7 formats with the start of equipment repair in 4 hours and software support in 2 hours. Basically, such a guarantee is recommended by firms when purchasing storage systems. In percentage terms, prices do not differ much with similar conditions without software support. But given the vast range of configurations of disk shelves, the percentage may vary.
HP recommends purchasing the listed warranty support options with your equipment. One thing is clear: if you have one company server, it makes sense to insure yourself against a malfunction. In practice, serious damage is rare. Mostly HDDs, power supplies fly, and very rarely memory sticks, so repairs in most cases will be limited to replacing a failed part. Therefore, it may well be limited to the first option of a 3-year warranty support in 13x4x4 format. In this case, the total cost will be 761.250 rubles.
However, for small businesses there is a great option for less money to get a stronger guarantee of the smooth operation of the equipment. Output: server hardware refurbished. After all, by purchasing 2 HP Proliant DL360 G7 servers in a similar configuration, you already have the opportunity to create a fail-safe cluster in which the virtualization program will rely on a disk system.
Consider the following kit:
1. 2 HP Proliant DL360 G7 2x2.93 GHz Xeon Six-Core x5670 / 64Gb (8x8) PC3-10600R / no HDD SAS 2.5 "Hot Swap / 2xPower 2x1200W servers - 139.800 rub. X 2 = 279.600 rub. ;
2. 2 sets for connecting 4 HDDs - 11.900 rubles x 2 = 23.800 rubles;
3. 16 new 2.5 '' HDD SAS 300 GB 10k- 13.950 rub. x 16 = 223.200 rub.
Total: 526.600 rubles.
Not only that, if one server fails, the workflow does not stop, but also, focusing on the price of the new server we reviewed, you can purchase a spare parts cluster described above, consisting of a HDD , an 8 GB memory bar and a 1200W power supply . Such spare parts will cost 29.250 rubles.
In total, such a decision will cost 555.850 rubles. As a result, a similar (for tasks) server solution is found, with a guarantee in the form of fault tolerance and spare parts for less money.
But, as has been repeatedly stated, the choice of a server solution and guarantees for it remains with the buyer, and we are ready to help with this.